Try Our FreeMusic Production Software

Realistic Bass Guitar Sound with NI Scarbee MM-Bass (Part 2)

August 17, 2018

As I emphasized before, Scarbee MM-Bass by Native Instruments is one of the better bass guitar virtual representations I came across. It offers various options for playing and controlling. What’s more, I guarantee that if you dedicate some time to explore its full potential you will not be left unsatisfied. In the previous part of the tutorial for the Scarbee MM-Bass, I guided you through its basic functions and gave you a brief overlook of its interface. Since you got familiar with this, in part 2 I will show you some advanced features.

Scarbee MM-Bass advanced features

As in last part of this tutorial, let us start by loading and a fresh instance of Scarbee MM-Bass (by using Kontakt player) to newly created MIDI channel within SoundBridge.

Perform tab

In the left part of the interface, you can see a tab that has “Perform” written by default. Moreover, if we click on it, the drop-down menu appears.

As you can see above, here we get a list of many different submenus holding various controls. For example, if we click on the “Players Profile”, we can select one of the 3 different styles. Therefore, their playing styles change the fret behavior as follows :

Pop & Country : No specific preference for low/high frets

Soul & Funk: Frets above fret 4 are preferred

Rock & Retro: Frets above fret 6 are preferred

FX presets

Pursuing this further, we are moving forward to “FX Presets” where we can open a sub-menu. It is possible to choose from the interesting pre-saved preset bank. From Standard, Old school, New wave, my favorite is 2020 lead which sounds really fat and spacious.

Pickup hit

Next feature from this menu that I would like to mention is the “Pickup Hit”. It is basically a sound of a player hammering right-hand fingers on strings when playing hard. With this feature, by dialing the Ratio parameter, you can control how much of the pickup hammering sound should be present.

Controllers

One more useful feature from this section is the “Controllers” submenu. Here with using CC mapping, you can switch between different articulations of the sequence that played. Let’s list a few :

Playing position: Will affect the next note, but not lock the position like holding position key switch (F5-B6) pressed does.

Slide mode: Is used to activate Slide Mode (by default is set to CC#64)

All this CC mapping can be changed to different lines by your choosing.

Let me now show you how to engage for example the Slide mode followed by a short audio example of the bass guitar sequence which I made using Scarbee MM-Bass.

As you can see in the Soundbridge`s MIDI editor I marked a MIDI CC tab in red. Moreover, by clicking on this tab we enter the submenu where I will choose the MIDI CC#64 which controls the slide mode. Here is how it looks like.

After selecting the MIDI CC#64 we are taken back to the MIDI editor. Here, I will draw the line for Slide mode by clicking on the “View MIDI CC” tab. I marked it in red in the picture below. The line appears on the middle of the piano roll but to get the full effect of the Slide mode I will pull it up to the maximum value, which is 127.

In the end, let us hear how this bass sequence sounds with all the settings I mentioned in this tutorial.